Project Summary
The Yale Daily News Historical Archive provides access to digitized versions of printed issues of the Yale Daily News, the student newspaper of Yale University. The full text of these issues is indexed and searchable through the web interface. The Yale Daily News, founded on January 28, 1878, is the oldest college daily newspaper published in the United States. The historical archive begins in 1878 and is not yet comprehensive: issues will continue to be added up to January 2001, when the Yale Daily News Current Online Issue Archive begins.

For 130 years, the Yale Daily News has been the primary source of news and debate at Yale. Typically published every weekday when the University is in session, the newspaper is the oldest college daily in the United States. Many of the paper’s student editors, writers, and contributors have gone on to prominent careers in journalism and public life, including William F. Buckley, Lan Samantha Chang, John Hersey, Joseph Lieberman, Samantha Power, Sargent Shriver, Paul Steiger, Strobe Talbott, Calvin Trillin, Garry Trudeau, Jacob Weisberg, and Daniel Yergin.

Display, Navigation, and Searching
When a Yale Daily News issue is digitized, an image of each page is made. These images are "cleaned up" to improve readability on the screen and to improve the quality of printing. Yellowing or other discoloration is removed. Each page of an issue may be viewed in its entirety. This project makes use of "zoning" technology when the material is scanned, so that articles that display on different pages are joined together. When a reader selects an article that starts on page 1 and finishes on page 6, that complete article will display in its entirety in a new window.

In addition to the image of each page, optical character recognition is done on each page of the issue. As a result, along with browsing by year, words and phrases may be searched across the entire collection, and then also within a particular issue.